Friday Mystery Meat Salad, Random Ten, and attempt to salvage the honor of Bloggerpalooza.

Yep, that's right, it's salad today. No meat on a Friday. I would've called it "Tossed Salad," but then I realized one of you picklewipes would've immediately made some kind of joke about it.

· I know I'm biased on account of us having the same parents and all, but this rumination over at Practically Harmless on the illogic of faith and the absurdity of making it a requirement for public office is one of the most insightful, sensible, well-written posts I've ever read on any blog anywhere. Amd this is coming from someone who doesn't even know why he's not allowed to eat meat today, he only knows his mom told him it would make the baby Jesus cry.

· OK, so I just saw an ad for the new Dodge Avenger in which the focal point was the fact that the car has a 20-gig hard drive. So that the car can . . . be your iPod or something, if you don't already have an iPod. I guess. (I've seen similar pitches for its sister vehicle, the Chrysler Sebring.) It reminded me of the ad campaign for the Buick Lucerne that seemed to emphasize absolutely nothing other than the fact the car could heat up its windshield-washer fluid. Look, I'm sure that a 20-gig hard drive in a car might be kind of cool for some purposes that I really can't think of at the moment, and that heated washer fluid might be useful in a place like Birmingham on as many as two or three days out of the year. But are they really trying to get people to buy cars based solely on this?


Holds up to 5,000 songs! And, uh, drives, or something.

I got an idea for the American carmakers: Instead of spending all this effort coming up with hard drives and fluid heaters, howsabout you start buying your dashboard materials from someone other than Fisher-Price. Tune a suspension as if the people who drive the car actually give a rat's ass about how it takes a corner. And build a hybrid, for shit's sake! Seriously, the Honda Insight has been on sale in this country for nearly eight years now, and you guys still don't offer a hybrid passenger car?

For all the advances they've made over the awful '70s and '80s, the American car companies are still trying to sell cars like McDonald's sells burgers -- just pile as much stuff onto 'em as you can and hope that the fat, lazy, stupid public has nothing better to do than gobble 'em up. One of these days the Big Three are going to have to start building cars people actually want and not cars that people will merely settle for; then they might have something to hang their hats on other than a single wowee feature.

Or to look at it another way, do you think Mercedes-Benz has ever had to cram a hard drive into a dashboard to sell a car? Nope. They are, however, giving serious thought to unloading Chrysler entirely. But hey, I'm sure those 20-gig hard drives will turn everything right around.

· A couple months ago, a reader thanked me for this post because it introduced her to the concept of a "Sitzpinkler," the German term for a wussy male who's so whipped he sits down to pee. Those Germans, they got a good word for everything! And the other day I learned yet another excellent word to add to my collection of concise Krautisms such as "Sitzpinkler" and "Schadenfreude": "Backpfeifengesicht," which translates roughly to "a face that cries out for a fist in it." If it'll help you visualize, some prominent Backpfeifengesichte belong to Sean Hannity, Tommy Tuberville, Bill Kristol, and Jimmy Clausen. I wonder if, in some part of Germany, this might also be known as a Scheißeëssengrinsen.


Be honest -- you'd love to put some backpfeifen in this gesicht.

· You know what? G'ahead and add Tom Brady to that list. Yes, I freely admit this is only out of burning jealousy, but be that as it may, Christ. I call it a red-letter day if the cute Japanese barista at the Starbucks on 11th so much as makes eye contact with me, but here's Tom Brady getting to inject his thrice-Super-Bowl-winning seed into pretty much any internationally renowned beauty he chooses. And I didn't win the Mega Millions lottery on Tuesday! Fuck this, I'm gonna go punch a kitten.



· Almost forgot. The Ten:

1. Pet Shop Boys, "The Resurrectionist" (Goetz B. extended mix)
2. Patton Oswalt, "How We Won the War"
3. Fugazi, "Bulldog Front"
4. U.N.K.L.E., "Awake the Unkind"
5. Fatboy Slim, "The Sound of Milwaukee"
6. Happy Mondays, "Step On"
7. Garbage, "Special"
8. The Farm, "All American World"
9. Meat Beat Manifesto, "Let Go"
10. U2, "Acrobat"

· Finally, a couple people have asked about it, and yes, Kyle King and I are going to make an attempt to revive G-Day Bloggerpalooza for this year's Georgia spring football game on Saturday, April 8. I say "revive" because, well, last year's Bloggerpalooza was pretty much on life support from the moment it began -- a combination of subpar communication (my fault) and ridiculous weather (God's) meant that it was attended by so few people we could've held the entire thing in a Toyota, and that's almost what we did. (It actually ended up being a parking garage, only a slightly more romantic venue.)

But I promise to do a more thorough job as Bloggerpalooza co-coordinator this year, and the organizing starts here: If you're interested in attending, even if you're not technically a blogger, shoot an e-mail to heyjennyslater.blog (at) gmail.com and let me know you want in, and I'll tell you as much about it as I can. Really there's not a lot to tell -- we'll probably try to get started around 9 a.m., somewhere on the North Campus quad close to the main library -- but if you want to volunteer to bring anything, and I know you do, you're more than welcome to do so. Naturally, I will be contributing beer and Krispy Kreme donuts to the festivities. So shoot me an e-mail and let's make this happen!


I would prefer that we get to take this picture outside this year.